A style does not go out of style as long as it adapts itself to its period. When there is an incompatibility between the style and... a certain state of mind, it is never the style that triumphs.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Our young people are diseased with the theological problems of original sin, origin of evil, predestination, and the like. These n...ever presented a practical difficulty to any man,--never darkened across any man's road, who did not go out of his way to seek them. These are the soul's mumps, and measles, and whooping- coughs, and those who have not caught them cannot describe their health or prescribe a cure. A simple mind will not know these enemies.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Life's an awfully lonesome affair.... You come into the world alone and you go out of the world alone yet it seems to me you are m...ore alone while living than even going and coming.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Language must be raked, the secrets of slaughter-houses and infamous hole that cannot front the day, must be ransacked, to tell wh...at negro slavery has been. These men, our benefactors, as they are producers of corn and wine, of coffee, of tobacco, of cotton, of sugar, of rum and brandy; gentle and joyous themselves, and producers of comfort and luxury for the civilized world,--there seated in the finest climates of the globe, children of the sun,--I am heart-sick when I read how they came there, and how they are kept there. Their case was left out of the mind and out of the heart of their brothers.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The Southern States are uneasy at the prospect of [Abraham] Lincoln's election today. The ultra South threatens disunion, and it n...ow looks as if South Carolina and possibly two or three others would go out of the Union. Will they? And if so, what is to be the result? Will other slave States gradually be drawn after them, or will the conservative States draw back into the Union or hold in the Union the ultra States? I think the latter. But at all events, I feel as if the time had come to test this question. If the threats are meant, then it is time the Union was dissolved or the traitors crushed out. I hope Lincoln goes in.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The pickings are pretty slim when you have to play the part of a housewife who doesn't go out of her apartment because she's afrai...d she's going to get mugged, or a woman who turns into her brother, who is a murderer.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive readerwho loses my subject, not I. Som...e word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

The comic imagination deals in miraculous transformations and instantaneous casting-off of burdens and sufferings. It releases sud...den floods of feelings and allows the purging of enmity in play. The comic sense can cause a sensation of wholeness and integrity of being, though one that is almost brief and passing. When we are in a festive mood and laughing, we seem to go out of our normally anxious, reflective selves into a different phase of being, and the comic flow within us dissolves our sense of limitation. Time stands still, and we feel ourselves to be the center of life. Mirth so intensifies the moment that it could be described as sanctifying life by the sheer unself-conscious vitality that it stimulates within us. No wonder, then, that the act of laughter and the surge of comic joy in a death-haunted, misery-prone creature could be, and sometimes has been, seen and felt as a natural intrusion of the miraculous into the self--as, that is, a religious experience.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »